From Castle to Palace

So I still can't find a way to post my pictures! But I will tell you what is happening. We made it from Frankfurt and the youth hostel there (with cheap washing and food and a place for the kids to play Giant Chess) to church the next morning. Will acted up in sacrament meeting and when I tried to discipline him, he said "But it isn't my fault! You woke me up too early this morning!" and he was right.

After church, Katie and I walked into the three or four blocks of Frankfurt that had been remade in the old style after the bombing. I just wanted to give Frankfurt a chance and see something that wasn't the strange underworld of youth hostels.

Then we jumped on a bus and a train and went up to Bacharach, low down on the Rhine. When we got out, we could see the castle we were staying in, perched up at the top of the hill. And we called a taxi.

He came rumbling along about 15 minutes later, with a short bus and a good mood, and decided to stick our whole group on and all of our luggage too, so it was a smart choice all around. John, our facilitator, was waiting there for us with keys to our rooms -- in the tower. Yup, we got to spend the night in the tower of a castle on the Rhine. Our room looked out onto the river and vineyards lining the hills. It was something else! The rooms had been redone in the youth hostel style with linoleum floors and bunk beds, but we all had private baths and it was nice and clean (which you couldn't say about Munich's hotel . . . ). We had dinner there and breakfast there, and would have stayed on if we could have.

But instead we walked through town and admired the half-timbered houses and towers and then Rob went back up the very steep hike and with Chloe and a few students, loaded everyone's luggage back onto the happy taxi driver's short bus and brought it down to the loading dock for our Rhine cruise.

It was senior day on the Rhine. No, I mean it really was. They had some sort of discount and they were plentiful. But the weather was good and we fed the kids lunch down in the dining room, by which time plenty of people had gotten off in St. Goar or Boppard or some other hot spot, so we were able to snag some chairs up on top. I took the four month old baby, Soren, who has come with us, and he fell asleep on me for a few hours, so I couldn't chase after the [increasingly wild] children. So sorry!

We got off in Koblenz and had to ride one extremely crowded bus to the train station, then caught a train to Bonn, then decided we had had enough, and caught 9 taxis to take us to our final youth hostel for tonight and tomorrow night. The Annaberg was a palace at some point, but I can't say that I know for whom or for what.

It is now a somewhat musty, moldy, slate-roofed mansion that is rented out on the cheap and run by a brother and sister who have been extremely accommodating. They made dinner for all of us with about an hour's notice, have offered a spot for a bon fire (the Bonnfire as the students call it), and are letting us light the candles in the dining room for hot chocolate and cake tomorrow night. Our extremely irritable and irrational kids are happy to be playing in their very green yard, riding trikes and scooters and playing in the sandbox. I am less excited about sharing bathrooms of questionable cleanliness with people, but I am getting so relieved that we're coming to the end of our trip and we haven't left any children anywhere! Though today we did have two items left on the train from our group -- we'll see if the Deutsch Bahn can track them down for us.

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